Hardware in loop testing?

[Krakonos]

Hi!

I'm currently running an old Drone CI instance and looking to migrate to woodpecker soon. However, I floated the idea of adding hardware into the test loop. I wonder if there is any progress on this? Would it be wanted by the community?

Originally I did some research on Drone. The approach I was thinking of is to fork an agent, create a new architecture that would represent agent running my special hardware (some devices connected over USB) -- modifying the agent to also pass the USB devices into the container (in my case, I'd be using docker only).

In woodpecker I can see I can use labels to filter for the hardware and local workflow to achieve this. This is a good first step. However, this does not result in a reproducible build due to the presistent local environment.

What would be the best approach to get this working inside a container?

• Is it possible to define some custom resource in kubernetes backend?
• Use USB/IP in docker? Though after reading the docs, I get the sense it will still need runner support.
• Fork the docker runner and have a custom runner for this purpose? (I'd prefer docker for this use case for simplicity).

If it would be wanted in upstream, I'd consider implementing docker runner options that would allow USB and/or /dev/X passthrough.

I'd like to see something like this:

steps:
  - name: 'My hardware in loop step'
    image: alpine
    commands:
      - echo "Hello world" > /dev/my-fancy-usb-device
    backend_options:
      docker:
        devices:
          - /dev/my-fancy-usb-device

The docker backend would then handle the rest. In case of USB/IP, the system admin would also have to export the device manually, which would serve as a good protection, since the container cannot access arbitrary device on the host system without it being previously shared.

(I really hope I missed this piece somewhere and it's already implemented :-))

Thoughts?